But just a day prior, Holmes was busy with a rather routine activity for a celebrity – she was giving an interview for C Magazine.

“Going back over the tapes, there were signs: Holmes was certainly very aware of herself, laying a couple cards on the table but never showing her whole hand,” senior editor Kelsey McKinnon, who conducted the interview for the lifestyle glossy, tells WWD. “Most noticeably, the one name decisively absent from her lexicon: Tom Cruise.”

Adds McKinnon of Holmes, who also posed for the magazine’s September issue a week before the big reveal: “She never actually refers to him by name over pages and pages of transcription.”

As Holmes’s answers seem to take on deeper meanings given the timing of the interview, one question stands out: Did the couple’s 6-year-old daughter, Suri, bring them closer together? McKinnon asked.

“I don’t know. I mean I don’t know,” Holmes, seemingly uncomfortable, told the magazine. “People have been having babies a long time.” (As the couple moves on as single parents, Holmes reportedly has sole physical custody of Suri, although Cruise was granted generous visitation rights.)

In another telling interview conducted before the divorce, Holmes also hinted at her decision to end her five-year marriage.

“I know who I am and where I am and where I want to go,” she told Elle about six weeks before she filed for divorce, “so I want to focus on that.”